From Obama’s speech yesterday, at the CINO Notre Dame graduation:

This tradition of cooperation and understanding is one that I learned in my own life many years ago – also with the help of the Catholic Church.

I was not raised in a particularly religious household, but my mother instilled in me a sense of service and empathy that eventually led me to become a community organizer after I graduated college. A group of Catholic churches in Chicago helped fund an organization known as the Developing Communities Project, and we worked to lift up South Side neighborhoods that had been devastated when the local steel plant closed.

It was quite an eclectic crew. Catholic and Protestant churches. Jewish and African-American organizers. Working-class black and white and Hispanic residents. All of us with different experiences. All of us with different beliefs. But all of us learned to work side by side because all of us saw in these neighborhoods other human beings who needed our help – to find jobs and improve schools. We were bound together in the service of others.

And something else happened during the time I spent in those neighborhoods. Perhaps because the church folks I worked with were so welcoming and understanding; perhaps because they invited me to their services and sang with me from their hymnals; perhaps because I witnessed all of the good works their faith inspired them to perform, I found myself drawn – not just to work with the church, but to be in the church. It was through this service that I was brought to Christ.

At the time, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was the Archbishop of Chicago. For those of you too young to have known him, he was a kind and good and wise man. A saintly man. I can still remember him speaking at one of the first organizing meetings I attended on the South Side…

So it was the Catholics who made a Christian out of him?

No, that was just a bone he threw to the Catholics.  Cardinal Bernardin was the Archbishop of Chicago from 1985-1996.  But Obama actually was baptized in Rev. Wright’s church in 1988.

He worked at the Community Development Project in Chicago from 1985-1988, then he went to Harvard; he returned to Chicago after becoming a lawyer.

During the Presidential campaign, the NY Times detailed Obama’s conversion to Christianity:

Twenty years ago at Trinity, Mr. Obama, then a community organizer in poor Chicago neighborhoods, found the African-American community he had sought all his life, along with professional credibility as a community organizer and an education in how to inspire followers. He had sampled various faiths but adopted none until he met Mr. Wright, a dynamic pastor who preached Afrocentric theology, dabbled in radical politics and delivered music-and-profanity-spiked sermons.

(Of course, that was before Obama had to throw his mentor under the bus and quit that church so he could get elected.)

Huh.  No mention of multi-cultural working together, although the DCP was founded originally by 8 Catholic parishes.  In fact, in 2006 Obama goes into great detail about how the “black church” affected him.

It is particularly egregious to me to throw Cardinal Bernardin’s name around as though they were buddies.  Cardinal Bernardin was a staunch defender of “The Seamless Garment”, that life must be protected from conception to natural death.

That said, I did find this Obama quote from Time magazine a little puzzling.

This is not to say that I’m unanchored in my faith. There are some things that I’m absolutely sure about–the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all its forms, the value of love and charity, humility and grace.

I do find it odd that he apparently he’s not sure whether God created the universe or if there’s an afterlife, but latched onto the Golden Rule.  (And after latching on to the Golden Rule, got involved in Chicago politics…)

President Obama, if you are going to take Luke 6:31

Do to others as you would have them do to you.

as Gospel truth, do not ignore Matthew 25:40, a verse your campaign co-opted to help get you elected:

Note:  this post is not about whether or not Obama is a Christian, but is intended to point out inconsistencies in Obama’s story as he panders to whatever audience is around.

Related: 9 Key Developments in Obama’s Notre Dame speech

Tagged as: notre dame, Obama, Prolife, speech